Creating a Facebook Saved Audience – Quick Guide

Get better results from your Facebook Ads by crafting a great audience

Facebook ads are a great way to advertise your business but if you want your money to work harder, you need a fine-tuned audience to target.

When I build an audience for a client, the first thing I do is ask the client a series of questions:

What are your goals for this campaign?

Who typically uses your product/service?

Who typically buys your product/service?

Where are they located? Will you travel to provide your service?

What products/services do they purchase from other businesses?

Creating a Saved Audience

From these questions, I can get an idea as to the type of audience I will be creating. Let’s walk through this with an example. We’ll build an audience for a coffee shop.

What are your goals for this campaign? To increase sales of coffee from Tuesday – Thursday

Who typically uses your product/service? College Students

Who typically buys your product/service? College Students

Where are they located? Will you travel to provide your service? They attend the local university, about 8 blocks away

What products/services do they purchase from other businesses? A lot of them talk about sports and wear Seattle Seahawks apparel

With this information, we can begin creating a Facebook Saved Audience.

Navigate to the Audience Creation Tool

When you first get to the Facebook Saved Audience creation tool, this is what you will see.

Name and choose a location

We’ll start by giving our Facebook audience a name so it’s easy to recognize it when we create our ad campaign.

Next, we want to select a geographical location for our audience. Here, I chose to drop a pin on the location of the university and gave it a 1-mile radius (the smallest size) since we want to focus on foot traffic to the coffee shop.

Select your demographics and interests to target

Scrolling down, we can choose the Age, Gender, Languages, and Detailed Targeting for our audience.

Since we want to target college students, we’ll select the age range 18-23, all genders, and any language. In the Detailed Targeting section, we’ll use the information we gathered above in the questionnaire.

We know our audience is in college so we’ll select people in college between the years of 2015 – 2021. That should include everyone from Freshman to Seniors.

We also learned that current customers are interested in the Seattle Seahawks so we can add that interest.

Finally, we want to target people that have shown interest in coffee since we’re advertising a coffee shop.

I recommend only using 3-5 items in the Detailed Targeting section. That allows you to create a detailed audience without narrowing it down to the point that your ads are only shown to a handful of people.

Click “Create Audience” and you have created your Saved Audience! Your audience is saved to use when you begin creating your ad campaign.